1) The steering is terrible, waaaay too sensitive to wheel to wheel racing or little adjustments down a straight. Clear step back from previous games.2) The brakes are lame. They don´t have enough stopping power at high speed, they don´t lock up at low speed. Just press a button and wait for it to slow down enough.3) With TC off, you need to be a moron to get any sort of wheelspinning. The ammount of steerig lock applied is irrelevant to the ammount of throttle you can use.4) You can cheat the tracks like a monkey. Riding the big red curbs in Monza chicanes not only don´t send you airborne, they don´t upset the car and are the fastest way around.5) AI is terrible. Just keep it full throttle through Curva Grande and you pass people on lap 1.6) When you slide, which is really hard, they introduced a lame wheel scratching sound ala Gran Turismo!!! In a F1 game!!

It looks great, handles like a pig. Won´t buy straight away.

You can adjust that by increasing the linearity. Should also point out that the demo doesn't have full setting for AI/penalties.

Personally I don't get that.. the whole "unfinished product" approach to a demo.

If I were showcasing my new game in the form of a demo and I wanted to convince people to go out and spend money on it... AND I knew that my potential player base was already smaller than before due to people owning previous versions of the game and not seeing enough reasons to go out and buy again... I'd want the demo to fully represent the finished product.. but only 10% of it.

So for example, only 3 lap races. Limited everything else. But still.. the finished product. Releasing a demo with sub par AI settings just strikes me as a very weird decision personally. But then i'm not a game designer, so perhaps I don't understand the pressures they were under to get the demo out. But still... it's not exactly selling itself to anyone... to the point of wondering if they'd have been better off not even having a demo at all.

More and more crappy stuff showing up with more time of gameplay. This game will be still unraceable without stupid proximity indicators or stupid look back cam, as car´s mirrors are lame. Cars show up when they´re already moving alongside you, there´s no way to know when to make a defensive move trusting the mirrors.

Interesting application of the rules in my last Monza race. So I lose it like Webber and recover like Webber.. and immediately the local area is yellow flagged. I'm getting myself back up to racing speed but as I am doing, about 6 cars breeze past me.. in a yellow flag zone. They didn't get a penalty. I suspect had I driven past a slow AI car in a yellow zone, i'd have got an immediate punishment.

Also general F1xxxx question.. do the AI cars make mistakes, crash etc, in this game?

Also general F1xxxx question.. do the AI cars make mistakes, crash etc, in this game?

I never saw it happen during my time playing F1 2010. They'll go slow through some corners and faster through others, but usually it's too consistent to be regarded as a 'mistake'. You'll get a reprieve from your opponents' dodgy pit strategy or an unusually slow qualifying lap every once in a while, though, it seems.

I enjoyed F12010, but skipped last years version, so this demo was my first experience with KERS/DRS.
Made me realize how gimmicky the whole thing is.

Not to mention, it's a handful playing on a controller, especially if you play with the throttle/brake mapped to the right stick like I prefer to play.
I've had to re-map the gearchanges to L1/R1, KERS to L2, and DRS to R3. Look-back I just stuck on R2.

I've not found any control issues really. I'm using the PS3 pad and the car seems really good to control. Braking is fine and turning is fine too. I find driving very neatly seems to work best and I try to avoid the curbs. Saved a couple of tank slappers too. The AI however seem really slow. I keep upping the difficulty level but they never seem to get any quicker. Maybe it's because my save is between qualifying and the race so it's not giving me the new AI settings in the race.

I've always hated the R2 brake, L2 accelerate I think it was buttons - changed it back to X for accelerate and Square for brake like the old fashioned way, but I like it like that. And I think R1 and L1 for KERS and DRS, seems better like that.

Just hope I'm not as rubbish on it as I was at F1 2011 and 2010. The only game I really mastered on PlayStation was F1 2003. Now that was a gem.

Yikes!
Veteran of G3-GT5, Forza4, GP3, F1 RS, Sony F1 (PS3), F1 2011 I could say this demo has been worst F1 game ever I have played.
Menus, sounds and musics are nice but wow...I have no idea if I'm trying to drive freight train or land Airbus A380 into rural airport of north Norway on ice.
Car feels very loose on high speed and brakes are like uh...where they are in this game anyway. Turning at low speed is painfull because car just doesn't turn.

Little banner said this is not like final product, but steps made from 2011 are several decades back and maybe several whisky bottles too.
Graphics feels even worse than in last year official game, no great feeling on track with Logitech's Driving Force Pro. If final product feels anywehre so bad than this I would recommend you guys buing Need for Speed run for better feel.

This is also second worst demo I've played with PS3, worse been only Need for Speed Shift 1.

Yikes!Veteran of G3-GT5, Forza4, GP3, F1 RS, Sony F1 (PS3), F1 2011 I could say this demo has been worst F1 game ever I have played.Menus, sounds and musics are nice but wow...I have no idea if I'm trying to drive freight train or land Airbus A380 into rural airport of north Norway on ice.Car feels very loose on high speed and brakes are like uh...where they are in this game anyway. Turning at low speed is painfull because car just doesn't turn.

Little banner said this is not like final product, but steps made from 2011 are several decades back and maybe several whisky bottles too.Graphics feels even worse than in last year official game, no great feeling on track with Logitech's Driving Force Pro. If final product feels anywehre so bad than this I would recommend you guys buing Need for Speed run for better feel.

This is also second worst demo I've played with PS3, worse been only Need for Speed Shift 1.

Far out, they had the driving pretty much set. They really needed to work on career mode this year, instead they go and stuff up the games's one selling point!

I must admit I was skeptical about this year though the minute I saw in video's drivers praising features that were previously in the last 2 years but acting as if they were new features and the developers not correcting them.

Tried the demo on the Xbox360, and i was very dissapointed... That said, i was driving with the xbox controller, my g27 wheel i use onthe PC is not supported on the xbox, so it might be better with a proper setup, but still...

Braking has been discussed earlier in the thread, and here is my view... at low speed the front locks VERY easy (might be due to the xboxcontroller lacking finess), and the car feels reluctant to turn in. At high speed i felt the brakes was lacking in stopping power (you do need to down shift pretty agressivly to engine brake (kers?), but even doing that it was a bit lackluster).

Handling for the rest felt ok compared to the F1 2010 on the PC, never tried the 2011 edition though. The handling in this title will allways be on the arcade side of things, and compared the the Williams F1 in iRacing, i prefer the iRacing car

Sound and atmosphere was good, menus looked nice, gfx i felt was good on the xbox (the mclaren chrome was perhaps a bit too shiny and reflective from the incar view)...

Still, this is not a game i would run out and buy on release... if i can get a bargain downloadable version on the xbox market place later on, i could be tempted to try it out at some stage, but that is about it unfortunately.

My money's going on WRC 3. Codies have had my money twice now with F1 2010 and F1 2011. F1 2010 was great but 2011 was poorer in my book and it seems from the demo that 2012 is even worse. I have no confidence in Codies giving us players what we really want.

- Tyre wear doesn't scale for shorter than 100% races. An option tyre will do 18 laps at Abu Dhabi, irregardless of race length. 50% races tend to only need one stop, dut to the tyre lasting so long compared to the race length. Tyres did scale for different race lengths in F1 2011 (option only lasted for 9 laps at Abu Dhabi in 2011), requiring a similar number of pit stops whatever race distance was selected.- Fuel strategy doesn't seem to work. Whatever strategy I chose, on whatever race distance, I was always +3 laps once the lights went out (same as F1 2011). Although fuel is used quicker when in fast engine mode.- LED flag boards still don't function for yellow flag incidents. I haven't seen a safety car yet, but I will assume that it will be like F1 2011 where they only work when the safety car is out.- There's quite a big differnce between AI performance in the different difficulty modes. Pole times from Abu Dhabi - Legend 1:42.6, Pro 1:45.8, Int 1:50.3. If you do a 1:47.x as your best lap, you're going to fall between professional and intermediate difficulty.- Marbles can be picked up in the same places in Abu Dhabi as the demo - including the straight with the support pits and start grid. You will pick up marbles if you drive to the right there, where the real life racing line is.- There seems to be some aliasing issues with the Xbox 360 version - lots of jagged lines.- AI are still pretty easy to outbreak, especially if you chose large brakes and high pressure.

I read a review on this game today, and it said you can not even play as your favourite driver through a full f1 season (Championship Mode) disappointing.

Not a problem for me. I've always preferred the Career modes. I play these games to get to this place in my head where I'm an F1 driver, not just telling Jenson when to brake and turn (I do that enough at the TV!)...

Having played the demo I can't believe how bad it is yet again. I appreciate the demo doesn't represent the final product but just from a quick play there's numerous flaws to pick up on.

- The graphics are still dire and non-HD - the lines flickering across the screen on PS3 are particularly bad. I dread to think how bad the game will perform at Monaco
- The handling is poor and inconsistent. Certain corners and kerbs throw the car uncontrollably into a spin (the inside kerb at Monza's second chicane for example) whereas you can completely cut other corners (Ascari) and the car doesn't even twitch
- The braking distances are totally unrealistic (top cars braking at 200m into the first chicane at Monza? I must have imagined watching them brake at the 150m board when I attended the race last year...)
- AI and the penalty system is dreadful - AI cars don't even go flat through Curva Grande ffs and the penalties are horribly inconsistent (AI cars pushing me into others resulted in me getting penalties, and in one case I was shunted into another car, causing them to spin and I got disqualified )
- The lap times are unrealistic - I set the AI difficulty to the highest level, set a pretty poor qualifying time of 1.25.4...yet secured pole by several tenths
- The flag markerboards and other lights still don't appear to work properly - if you pit the exit light shows red (as it did in F1 2011), hardly a difficult thing to fix surely?

There's probably more things to pick up on but those are just off the top of my head. For me the most frustrating thing is so many of the errors are basic things that should be part of any F1 game (realistic braking distances, cars able to take certain corners easily flat, realistic lap times, kerbs taken at high speed unsettling the car etc) - these are all fundamental things in any F1 game. I'm not after a full simulation game and wouldn't expect that on a console format, but when they seem incapable of getting the basics right and instead spend all year pi**ing about changing the menus and concentrating on fluffy elements that add no value to the game (nominating a rival etc...and then when you beat said rival, his team immediately offer you a contract, even if it's Red Bull or McLaren...wow realistic!) then I do wonder if they will ever produce a decent game. I actually thought F1 2010 was a good starting point for them to build on (it had some big flaws but as their first attempt at F1 I thought it was ok) but they seem to have made the games worse ever since.

What I can't work out is why the game is getting great reviews (IGN Eurogamer etc) when all of us know it is actually s**t. Are these supposed independent review actually influenced by the big games manufacturers like codemasters?

Played the demo myself for 10 mins got annoyed at how lazy they are and went back to Forza.

I imagine most games are reviewed as stand alone products rather than comparing them to other racing games on the market or comparing them to the years of racing games that have come before it. They're probably not F1 fans either.

Glad i'm not the only one who always spins if I clip that curb at the second chicane at Monza. It would be interesting to review Monza onboards to see how the real cars react to that corner.

I dunno.. in some respects I think they dropped the ball a bit but in other respects I get the chances. Removing the free practices is a smart move. Who ran them? I never did. I'd perhaps do one, if there was a development task I had to do.. but otherwise you just fast forward to the end. They were pointless. Valuable in real F1.. boring in a game. Much better to combine them. I can get what he means about testing.. if they put a feature in they don't want.. they still have to test it. Testing alone wasn't why they removed it.

I think they do a reasonable job. What's the alternative? What if there was no F1 game at all? I think what they produce is better than nothing.

I've always hated the R2 brake, L2 accelerate I think it was buttons - changed it back to X for accelerate and Square for brake like the old fashioned way, but I like it like that. And I think R1 and L1 for KERS and DRS, seems better like that.

I use a wheel and rarely a controller, but when I do THIS is the only way to go.

I imagine most games are reviewed as stand alone products rather than comparing them to other racing games on the market or comparing them to the years of racing games that have come before it.

Games are reviewed the same as cars are by the big auto writers. A bunch of corporate kiss asses take the beloved game companies product and spew back (almost to the exact phrase) all the same PR material. They see it as if they blast the game they will not get first looks/demos/ect..... All it makes them out to be are tools. I trust the buyers of the games reviews WAY more, but also keep in mind the hyperbole about this or that sucking/worst thing EVER. If it looks a potential buy for me I always spend a few extra bucks and rent it first before purchasing. Hasn't failed me yet.

Hmm is the 3rd one really a bug? Or just the developers trying to add a pit crew delay in doing two stops straight after each other? There has to be some time penalty.. they can't just do them bang one after the other.

But otherwise... ugh. Some really bad bugs there.. stuff you'd expect from their 1st game not the 3rd. Not great to see. Every game will have bugs of course but when your player base is finding them at retail and posting them all on youtube.. it's not good. Then again I think that happened with the other two.

I see they're doing F12013 next as they extended their deal with Bernie earlier in the year. I wonder how long they can get away with charging full whack for these games. In a way it would have perhaps been better if they built on a solid platform with DLCs containing cars, tracks, new physics, tyres etc.. rather than reworking the game over and over again to justify the price tag.

I haven't played much of the game, I played a little last night. I have only finished the young driver test and tried some hot laps on the new texas track. The young driver test is insanely easy and you only run one lap to try and put together a lap time, the rest is stupid stuff. I am more than sure that drivers put together lap times in the young driver test, I think there is an option to do some running but it is not part of the program and therefore doesn't count towards the day 1 or 2.

I'll play more tonight, but already I feel they have taken about four steps backwards. After last years game I thought they may have been improving, but even last year the put the career to one side and concentrated on co op. Someone else needs to grab this license, these guys are in it for a quick buck.

First impressions on PS3 are not that good. Improved graphics, but I get extreme amounts of understeer at Spa. Not just a little, but insane amounts. Regardless of setup I can barely get the rear end to even step out a bit. Always possible to adjust driving style, sure. But it's not really as fun to drive anymore :/

I can understand that they wanted to move away from the feel in 2011 where it sometimes was a bit too easy to just push the car like crazy and be agressive with steering input. But the balance now is just awkward.. anybody else with the same experience?

Edit: Using a G25 wheel, similair settings to what felt good in f1 2011.

I usually enjoy these games and have thoroughly enjoyed 2010 and 2011, they weren't the most realistic games ever, but they were fun. I've been playing this for an hour or so and the horrendous amount of understeer is unbearable. I'm going to continue playing and hope I find a way to make it fun and get around it, but so far it's not been great.

The handling is a lot better than it was in the demo, and so are the graphics.

While there is a bit of understeer, it's nothing a competent driver can't adapt to, however failure to take a corner properly can cause snaps of oversteer which are incredibly annoying (using a pad). A lot more emphasis on coaxing a car through a corner, instead of wildly flinging it in and hoping it sticks. Considering the rule changes in regards to the EBD this makes perfect sense.

The controller is a lot more precise than in F1 2011, which means slower corners and kerbs are a lot easier to manoeuvre, and it's easier to go in a straight line without making adjustments

Going offtrack with all four wheels is punished severely, and you immediately lose speed going down to the first or second gear, this has the added effect of making multiplayer online better since barring the first corner collisons, the trolls and the mediocre tend to get weeded out and left behind pretty fast.

Penalty system seems a lot better, was completely trashed by several cars into the first corner and for the first time ever I didn't recieve a penalty as if any of it was my fault. Considering the off track punishment its a lot harder to pass a car off track, so I haven't experienced having to give a place back.

Racenet is also pretty exciting, which are challenges based upon what happens during the real F1 weekends (similar to the Fifa one).

Just playing online I'll update further when I've done career and champions mode.

The handling is a lot better than it was in the demo, and so are the graphics.

While there is a bit of understeer, it's nothing a competent driver can't adapt to, however failure to take a corner properly can cause snaps of oversteer which are incredibly annoying (using a pad). A lot more emphasis on coaxing a car through a corner, instead of wildly flinging it in and hoping it sticks. Considering the rule changes in regards to the EBD this makes perfect sense.

The controller is a lot more precise than in F1 2011, which means slower corners and kerbs are a lot easier to manoeuvre, and it's easier to go in a straight line without making adjustments

Going offtrack with all four wheels is punished severely, and you immediately lose speed going down to the first or second gear, this has the added effect of making multiplayer online better since barring the first corner collisons, the trolls and the mediocre tend to get weeded out and left behind pretty fast.

Penalty system seems a lot better, was completely trashed by several cars into the first corner and for the first time ever I didn't recieve a penalty as if any of it was my fault. Considering the off track punishment its a lot harder to pass a car off track, so I haven't experienced having to give a place back.

Racenet is also pretty exciting, which are challenges based upon what happens during the real F1 weekends (similar to the Fifa one).

Just playing online I'll update further when I've done career and champions mode.

There's clearly a way to drive with the understeer, but it's just not fun like that. There's no way to properly attack with the setup, you don't have a choice to go for an oversteery setup which kinda sucks.

There's clearly a way to drive with the understeer, but it's just not fun like that. There's no way to properly attack with the setup, you don't have a choice to go for an oversteery setup which kinda sucks.

Fair enough I agree that it's unfortunate it doesn't provide you with the option.

There's clearly a way to drive with the understeer, but it's just not fun like that. There's no way to properly attack with the setup, you don't have a choice to go for an oversteery setup which kinda sucks.